These deep-seated changes in the age structure of the population have developed in recent decades and will continue to develop in the coming decades. These demographic changes are simultaneously accompanied by vast development in the available technology for diagnosis and therapy systems. The effects of these changes would result in collapse of the conventional intervention systems or coverage systems in this area in practice, particularly in the cash-value-based intervention systems for covering intervention events in medical diagnosis and/or therapy processes, especially as far as their financeability is concerned. Today, every fifth citizen is above 60 years old; in 2030, this will be every third one. The number of people above 80 years old is rising continuously; their number will increase by almost 90 percent by the year 2030. At the same time, the total population will fall by 10 percent by the year 2030. All intervention or coverage systems in the health sector will have to deal with this trend: both apportionment systems, in which all of the costs need to be financed totally from the ongoing income from premiums, and prospective entitlement coverage systems, for which the calculation of premiums also takes account of the use of health services, which increases with age. By way of example, private health insurance systems typically use the prospective entitlement coverage process for calculation. The basis of these systems is that even now they form the provision for future damage events. The stored financial collateralization levels formed in this way determine the survival of the system, in the expected situation, where an ever greater number of elderly people in retirement oppose an ever smaller number of people of working age. These systems should, in principle, not prompt the premiums to be transferred to other generations. In terms of insurance, every age group raises the cost of illness for its age group. Older insured parties are therefore, in principle, not dependent on the ability of the younger generation to pay. What are known as ageing provisions should therefore cover these insured parties for the future.
If the aforementioned intervention systems are used as single apparatuses under the prerequisite of complete intervention or complete or as complete as possible coverage of all possibilities, they have been found to be too vulnerable and unstable. For each of these intervention systems, framework parameters are therefore normally determined today, or the stipulated limits for intervention within which the intervention system can be activated for a specific case are synchronized with other systems. In the prior art, it is already the practice to introduce multistage intervention systems in order to get around this problem. These systems frequently comprise, by way of example, a first (public and/or private) stage with first intervention systems and at least one second stage with second intervention systems for direct intervention and/or cash-value-based coverage of events which the first stage does not cover or covers only partially by means of activation. The first and second stages typically involve different systems which are independent of one another. One drawback of this prior art is that the various stages cannot be clearly chained to one another for a wide variety of reasons, inter alia because the stages need to work independently of one another. Another drawback is that these systems have to date hardly been able to be automated, or have been able to be automated only with difficulty and at great cost, with the prior art. In addition, all of these systems were usually too unstable and vulnerable to error for effective use, despite their coupling. Another drawback was that all of these systems always only worked locally, i.e. in specific countries, since the technical structure of the health and insurance service usually differs considerably from country to country. It is an intrinsic property of these unautomated or semi-automated systems from the prior art that they always remain static, which prevents dynamic adaptation (self-adapting) of the systems. The technical basis for effective intervention or compensation is secure registering, rapid association and checking of the instances of damage which have occurred. In the case of cash-value-based intervention apparatuses, not only the damage sum as such but also more and more instances of intervention or instances of damage are frequently accompanied by an unclear legal situation from laborious and costly court proceedings. Particularly in the case of very costly diagnosis and/or therapy processes which are needed quickly, this can result in a financial disaster for the user or the insured party.
Systems for handling damage events in medical and/or therapeutic processes are known in the prior art. The international patent specification WO 02/077764 describes a process for automating such payments for services. Equally, partially automated intervention systems are known in the prior art. The patent specification US 2002/0172313 in the prior art describes a cash-value-based intervention system for medical and/or therapeutic processes. User data or patient data are transmitted to the intervention system and are filtered as appropriate. Finally, real-time or approximately real-time intervention systems and coverage systems are also known in the prior art and can be used to transmit and manage data securely between the service provider and the cash-value-based intervention system. The international patent specification WO 02/086688 in the prior art describes such a system. Equally, the international patent application PCT/US00/21529 (CA2381253) from the company ACE INA Holding, INC, Philadelphia, (US), shows an operational intervention system, where cash-sum values are transmitted and operational intervention is activated in response when a determinable and detectable event occurs. In all of the systems from the prior art, however, complete automation of the process is not possible. In particular, they relate almost exclusively to intervention systems from the first stage. Similarly, dynamic adaptation, e.g. concerning country-specific peculiarities and/or changes in the medical and/or therapeutic processes over time, is not an effective and simple matter with any system from the prior art. However, another important problem of all of these systems is also that the seamless coupling or reciprocal activation in multistage intervention systems not only produces problems but also evades automation almost completely. In this context, seamless means not only rapid and efficient activation of the intervention systems from the second stage if the intervention systems from the first stage cannot be activated, but also that effectively all possible intervention events are covered by at least one of the intervention systems. Another drawback to be mentioned is the country-specific foibles, for which such intervention systems can usually be implemented only with great technical complexity, particularly as far as the seamless coupling of the systems is concerned.